Understanding Media Quotes

“In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which is almost completely devoted to both a psychic and social study of communication, Shakespeare states his awareness that true social and political navigation depend upon anticipating the consequences of innovation: The providence that’s in a watchful state
Knows almost every grain of Plutus’ gold,
Finds bottom in the uncomprehensive deeps,
Keeps place with thought, and almost like the gods
Does thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles. The increasing awareness of the action of media, quite independently of their “content” or programming, was indicated in the annoyed and anonymous stanza: In modern thought, (if not in fact)
Nothing is that doesn’t act,
So that is reckoned wisdom which
Describes the scratch but not the itch. The same kind of total, configurational awareness that reveals why the medium is socially the message has occurred in the most recent and radical medical theories.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision. The General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs and lighting systems. It has not yet discovered that, quite as much as AT&T, it is in the business of moving information.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist “the antennae of the race.” Art as radar acts as “an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them. This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression. If art is an “early warning system,” to use the phrase from World War II, when radar was new, art has the utmost relevance not only to media study but to the development of media controls.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Jean-Paul Sartre, as much as Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller, has declared the futility of blueprints and classified data and “jobs” as a way out. Even the words “escape” and “vicarious living” have dwindled from the new scene of electronic involvement. TV engineers have begun to explore the braille-like character of the TV image as a means of enabling the blind to see by having this image projected directly onto their skins. We need to use all media in this wise, to enable us to see our situation.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Media study at once opens the doors of perception. And here it is that the young can do top-level research work. The teacher has only to invite the student to do as complete an inventory as possible. Any child can list the effects of the telephone or the radio or the motor car in shaping the life and work of his friends and his society. An inclusive list of media effects opens many unexpected avenues of awareness and investigation.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes. In his splendid work Preface to Plato (Harvard University Press, 1963), Eric Havelock contrasts the oral and written cultures of the Greeks. By Plato’s time the written word had created a new environment that had begun to detribalize man. Previously the Greeks had grown up by benefit of the process of the tribal encyclopedia. They had memorized the poets. The poets provided specific operational wisdom for all the contingencies of life — Ann Landers in verse. With the advent of individual detribalized man, a new education was needed. Plato devised such a new program for literate men. It was based on the Ideas.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The art and poetry of Zen create involvement by means of the interval, not by the connection used in the visually organized Western world. Spectator becomes artist in oriental art because he must supply all the connections.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Every culture and every age has its favorite model of perception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and everything. The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude — a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any “point of view.” The partial and specialized character of the viewpoint, however noble, will not serve at all in the electric age. At the information level the same upset has occurred with the substitution of the inclusive image for the mere viewpoint. If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch. As extension of man the chair is a specialist ablation of the posterior, a sort of ablative absolute of backside, whereas the couch extends the integral being.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man — the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“This change does not depend upon approval or disapproval of those living in the society.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Unaware of our typographic cultural bias, our testers assume that uniform and continuous habits are a sign of intelligence, thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“De Tocqueville was a highly literate aristocrat who was quite able to be detached from the values and assumptions of typography. That is why he alone understood the grammar of typography. And it is only on those terms, standing aside from any structure or medium, that its principles and lines of force can be discerned. For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact, as in the first bars of a melody.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“new visual print culture could take complete hold. The result was that the most important event in English history has never taken place; namely, the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolution. The American Revolution had no medieval legal institutions to discard or to root out, apart from monarchy. And many have held that the American Presidency has become very much more personal and monarchical than any European monarch ever could be. De Tocqueville’s contrast between England and America is clearly based on the fact of typography and of print culture creating uniformity and continuity. England, he says, has rejected this principle and clung to the dynamic or oral common-law tradition. Hence the discontinuity and unpredictable quality of English culture. The grammar of print cannot help to construe the message of oral and nonwritten culture and institutions.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“by a multitude of straight roads all converging on the same point. One has only to find the center and everything is revealed at a glance. But in England the paths run criss-cross, and it is only by travelling down each one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“or a dress was about. In such matters, people retained some sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity. But”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“To a highly literate and mechanized culture the movie appeared as a world of triumphant illusions and dreams that money could buy. It was at this moment of the movie that cubism occurred, and it has been described by E. H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion) as “the most radical attempt to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture — that of a man-made construction, a colored canvas.” For cubism substitutes all facets of an object simultaneously for the “point of view” or facet of perspective illusion. Instead of the specialized illusion of the third dimension on canvas, cubism sets up an interplay of planes and contradiction or dramatic conflict of patterns, lights, textures that “drives home the message” by involvement. This is held by many to be an exercise in painting, not in illusion. In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message. Is it not evident that the moment that the sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and we can now say, “The medium is the message” quite naturally.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“things in sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Any community that wants to expedite and maximize the exchange of goods and services has simply got to homogenize its social life.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Humans, as it were, become sex organs of the machine world”
― Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“Arquímedes dijo una vez: <> Hoy en día, habría señalado nuestros medios de comunicación electrónicos y habría dicho: <>. Pero una vez que hemos entregado nuestros sentidos y nuestros sistemas nerviosos a las manipulaciones de quienes tratan de sacar provecho aniquilando nuestros ojos, oídos, nervios y cerebro, el resultado será que ya no tendremos derechos.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man